Mick Hartley

Douglas Murray wonders why we're not more worried about what's happening in Turkey:

Having moved from prime minister to president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan appears now to be auditioning for the job of caliph. In December, he used his country’s hosting of the meeting of the 57-member Organisation of Islamic Cooperation to oppose President Trump’s announcement on the future movement of the U.S. embassy in Israel. Ahead of a meeting with the pope, Erdogan yesterday told the Italian paper La Stampa that at the meeting, “My top priority is Jerusalem.” So, on a visit to the head of the world’s Catholics, Erdogan gets to present himself as the head of the world’s Muslims. This is a long and perfectly open game. But it remains hard to find any coverage in the Western press that takes this long game seriously, so intent have we become on the short and increasingly local games of our own.

Last week, the Erdogan family’s foundation held a massive youth convention at the presidential palace in Ankara. There, Erdogan explained how he planned to use his faith to set the world straight. A significant portion of his audience then got to their feet as a bloc and began chanting, “War, Jihad, Martyrdom.” …

All of this seems to me to be the most ominous news possible. Certainly, there are more than enough stories in Trump’s America, as in Brexit Britain, to keep everyone occupied for several lifetimes. But it may well be in stories such as the backward tumble of Turkey that the events that will make the history books are all the time occurring.